On this day in 1952 the notorious and courageous firebrand Dr. Marie Equi died of renal disease at the age of 80 in a nursing home outside Portland, Oregon. Two years earlier she had fallen at home and fractured a hip. She never recovered, partly because she refused surgery and thus never benefited from physical therapy. The next morning a cortege left a funeral home in downtown Portland and proceeded a few blocks to St. Michael the Archangel Church. The church served the city’s Italian and immigrant community of working people who were so important to Equi. Although Equi objected to many Catholic tenets, she believed it was important to die “in the church,” she had told a friend, because it offered “such wonderful hope.”

Equi was eulogized in the newspapers in Portland, and her obituary appeared in the New York Times. Former Oregon Governor Oswald West, a sometime adversary of Equi, remarked upon hearing of her death, “She was a radical but she had a heart as big as a watermelon.”

After more than ten years of research and writing the life story of the remarkable Marie Equi, I am immensely pleased that her full-length biography will be released in two months.

MARIE EQUI, Radical Politics and Outlaw Passion available from the publisher, independent bookstores, and online September 15, 2015.

Note that in Equi's Certificate of Death, she is listed as living in Oregon for 60 years -- she arrived in The Dalles, OR in 1892 to homestead with her companion Bessie Holcomb. Also that her residence at time of death was "rural" -- her house at 1423 SW Hall Street today is in Portland's Goose Hollow neighborhood. The address listed on the certificate -- 1694 SW Montgomery -- actually was her daughter's house, located a few blocks away.

Reply

Dale

7/13/2015 04:09:17 am

I imagine that by 1952, Marie had sold her house in Goose Hollow, and that her daughter (who signed the death certificate) still had her house on Montgomery. Maybe the reference to rural refers to Fairlawn - way out on the east side in what is now the suburbs of Gresham, but pretty rural in 1952.